Free Whisper of Waves by Philip Athans Page A

liked it.
    “He was right, you see,” Willem admitted, “and I was wrong.”
    Her tongue began to caress the inside of his ear and he drew away playfully, unable to keep the grin from splitting his face. They turned onto their sides, facing each other, and Halina pulled the thin white sheet over their heads. He couldn’t look her in the eye, not when her body lay exposed so. He couldn’t take his eyes or his hands off her and didn’t bother trying, and she did nothing to stop him.
    “The master builder may have made a mistake,” he said.
    “Stop it,” she whispered. “Who else would he trust the way he trusts you?”
    “I told you: He trusts me for the wrong reasons,” replied Willem “There’s someone else. Someone I… someone I used to know. He would have been the better choice.”
    “Someone from Cormyr?”
    Willem nodded and said, “He’s here too. He came a few days, maybe a month, after I did.”
    “Then if he was so much better than you,” asked Halina, “why isn’t he becoming the master builder’s right hand instead of you?”
    Willem’s heart sank and he said, “Why not indeed?”
    “I believe in you,” she whispered, then they kissed.
    When they parted a few minutes later, he smiled and finally did look her in the eye. He brushed a strand of hair from her crystal blue eyes with the tip of a finger.
    “Why do we always end up here?” he asked, making his voice as light as he could, and finding it surprisingly easy to do.
    “Well, Master Korvan,” Halina replied, her voice a mockery of a chaste lady’s indignation, but the blush in her pale cheeks was all too sincere. “You should know better not to ask a lady why she—”
    “No, no, no,” he interrupted, placing a fingertip gently to her thin lips to silence her. As he went on, the tip of her tongue drew circles around his fingertip. “I meant, why do we always come here and not to the lady’s bed?”
    She gently brushed his finger away with a hand she then placed on his rough, unshaven face.
    “You know I live with my uncle,” she said. “Though there are many nights he doesn’t come home, I never know when he’ll be there, and I doubt he would approve.”
    “You know,” he said, “you’ve never told me about this uncle of yours, just that you live with him and the two of you are from Thay. What is he, a Red Wizard come to enslave the fair city-state of Innarlith?”
    A dark look crossed her eyes for so brief a moment, Willem couldn’t be sure he’d really seen it.
    “I’m sorry,” he said before she could speak. “That was boorish of me to make a joke like that… to assume everyone from Thay was some—”
    She silenced him with a kiss, then said, “My uncle has come here on his own, not as an agent of the realm. He has some business interests here, but he doesn’t trouble me with specifics. His name is Marek Rymiit.”
    She must have seen the effect the mention of that name had on him. Her eyes went wide and she took her hand off his cheek.
    “Marek Rymiit?” he said, pulling the sheet off his head so that they could see each other in the light from the fireplace. “Marek Rymiit is your uncle?”
    “You’ve heard of him,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
    “Hasn’t everyone with a pair of ears in Innarlith?” Willem replied. “He has the ear of the ransar, doesn’t he, and friends in all the right places.”
    Halina shrugged.
    “And you’re only now telling me this,” he said, “that you’re the niece of Marek Rymiit.”
    She smiled and shrugged again.
    Willem returned her smile, and his hands went to her body again. They kissed and for a moment, perhaps, Willem felt guilty for what he was about to do, but then the moment passed.
    He drew away from her gently and said, “Perhaps we shouldn’t meet like this again…”
    Her face became a mask of hurt and confusion, changing in a way only a woman’s could.
    “Until I meet your uncle, I mean,” he said, holding her gently by the back of